


Not Where We Had Wanted to Be

by IhaveAbadfeelingAboutThis



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Blood Pacts, Break Up, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 19:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20013688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IhaveAbadfeelingAboutThis/pseuds/IhaveAbadfeelingAboutThis
Summary: Albus and Gellert meet one last time before they duel - and they destroy the blood pact.





	Not Where We Had Wanted to Be

**Author's Note:**

> It’s not every song that reminds me of Gellert and Albus, but…  
> Somehow this came together after listening to Bastille’s 'World Gone Mad'
> 
> As always JKR owns the characters and the world and anything else recognizable

It had been like this for more than twenty years now: every time they met was preceded by negotiations at a distance, leading to a carefully worded oath allowing for a truce of 24 hours or less, just so that they could be in the same room together.  
This painful animosity had stretched out 150 times longer than the two months when they had seemed so close to one another that it felt as if they shared one soul. And yet, somehow those two short months had continued to define Albus’ feelings about Gellert more than the 44 years that followed them.

44 years – the 2 months in Godric’s Hollow, the 24 years of alienation, and the twenty years between: a time of sporadic meetings punctuated by long silences. Gellert would simply appear, as if he had just happened upon Albus by chance, and Albus allowed the illusion. They would pretend for an hour or three, and then Gellert would disappear again, gods knew where. He had never thought that he would be nostalgic for that era.

Now here he was, once again drinking a dead man’s whiskey in an appropriated apartment in a shelled city. Gellert was sitting in a nearby chair – so close that if Albus stretched out his leg, he could kick Gellert in the knee. There were many times when that would have been tempting, if it were not for the oath. He wondered how lightly he could kick him and not trigger the customary ‘no physical violence’ clause. And if kicking him lightly would be satisfying, or if instead it would just seem awkwardly flirty.

They had been sitting in silence for half an hour. Half an hour gone out of four. Gellert had said that he couldn’t imagine what they could possibly need more than four hours for, and Albus had reluctantly conceded that he was right.  
Albus was having trouble finding the place to begin.

Things Albus hadn’t said:  
“I’ve missed you.”  
“How many children have you and your people killed now? Have you been keeping count?”  
“How’s your world, Gellert? Is it all that you had hoped for?”  
“I still cannot understand how you thought that this could possibly work.”  
“Who are you?”  
“When did it stop being about wizarding supremacy and start being about you? Or was it always about you?”  
“Every time I see you, I feel like a fool for having thought I loved you.”

And if Albus had that much he couldn’t say, what hadn’t Gellert said? It was unlike Gellert to sit silently for thirty minutes. Surely he had something to say. But then, Gellert had not been the one to initiate one of these meetings in eight years now. So perhaps he didn’t have anything to say.  
Perhaps he was using his silence to communicate that there was no point in them speaking to one another – that neither of them had anything left that they had not already said. Or perhaps he believed that Albus would tear himself apart better than Gellert ever could, and was giving him the space in which to do so. Albus used to think that Gellert was impulsive, unrestrained, but he had learned that Gellert hid his intentions under a veneer of carefully manufactured bluster and spontaneity. Now that Albus had his primary strategy pegged, perhaps Gellert was hiding his intentions in his silence.

It occurred to Albus that, if this were a duel, Gellert would be trying to manipulate Albus into striking first – Gellert had always believed that gave him an advantage.  
Albus was happy to oblige.

“Fine whiskey.”  
“I’ve had better.”  
“I’m sure you have.”  
And back to silence.

“Hogsmeade is nice this time of year. Thank you for leaving Scotland untouched.”  
“Interesting that you think I have.”  
“Indeed.”  
And back to silence.

This silence stretched out longer than Albus had anticipated, but he was willing to wait.

“Fine, Albus. You win. Why are you here?”  
“Visiting an old friend?”  
“At no point were we friends.”  
“I suppose not.”

“I expect you to leave your clothes on this time.”  
Albus smirked. “I expect me to leave my clothes on this time as well.”

Gellert stood up to refill Albus’ tumbler, which he would only accept because of the ‘any administered potions must first receive the express verbal consent of the consumer, with said consent having been obtained without any coercion, enchantment, or under any kind of duress’ clause. (Also known as, ‘the answer to the question, “What does a man have to do to get a drink around here?”’)

There was nothing of the boy he’d once known in the man before him now – a massive broad-shouldered man who looked like he could take on twenty drunks in a bareknuckle brawl and come out the winner. The Gellert he’d met in Godric’s Hollow was on the tall side of average, stretched out, slight. He wavered between confidence and uncertainty. He had the same intensity as now, Albus supposed, but it was easy then to channel it in other directions: into duelling competitions, prank wars, snogging. The only thing this man and that boy had in common were their eyes, and their proclivity for evil genius monologuing. Albus snorted.

Gellert handed Albus back his tumbler, and stood considering him.  
“Well. For once you do _not_ look as if you’ve seen a ghost. About time.”  
“Too true, Gellert. It does not say much for my intelligence that it took me more than forty years to realize that two months is far too little time on which to base a life-time character assessment.”  
Gellert raised his glass to Albus and then drank half of it in one swallow.  
“If it is any comfort, I was only twenty years quicker than you were.”  
Albus laughed – and ached. He had miscalculated. He should not have set Gellert up to show him this glimpse of the one thing he had loved about him that was utterly unchanged: his sardonic humor. It was still there, even if it came out to play less often.  
Albus shook his head. It didn’t mean anything. It was the last surviving breadcrumb – picking it up would not begin to show him the way home. There was no safe shelter – there was no way home.

“Why are you here, Albus?”  
No safe shelter. It was time.  
“I want you to stop manipulating other people into trying to kill me.”  
“We’ve had this discussion, Albus. I can’t do that.”  
Albus hung his head and sighed.  
“It would hurt me less if you were to strike me down with your own hands than to have you cold-bloodedly scheme for someone else to do it.”

“You want me to kill you? If only I could.”  
Albus laughed bitterly. “I don’t want you to kill me. But if you want me dead, then I want you to try to do it yourself.”  
“Well, you know as well as I do that it is just not possible.”  
Albus stood and walked to the fireplace, slamming his tumbler on the mantelpiece.  
“I wish we had never made the blood pact. What idiots we were!”  
He looked at Gellert. He hoped he looked like he was losing control.

Gellert looked bored. Good.  
“Obviously. But we did make the blood pact, so here we are, the inheritors of our younger selves.”  
Albus walked over to Gellert, not even an arm’s length away.  
“But don’t you wish we hadn’t?”  
Gellert rolled his eyes. “No, it is so convenient not being able to kill you no matter how hard you work against me. Of course I wish we had never made the blood pact!”

Albus had been prepared – from the time he had set down his tumbler, he had had his left hand in his pocket holding tightly to the vial containing his and Gellert’s blood. As soon as he had walked closer to Gellert, he had held his right hand in readiness to grab Gellert’s shoulder the moment he began speaking the words.  
At the same time that Gellert had said the words, ‘I wish we had never made the blood pact!’ Albus had said them too.

The magic that was released would have been enough to make the lights flicker in the adjoining buildings, if there had still been electric power in the city.  
Even Albus was startled by its intensity, and he had been expecting – something.  
Gellert, on the other hand, was taken completely unawares, and so was, predictably, enraged.  
“What have you done?!”

“Oh Gellert,” said Albus, “For perhaps the last time, the correct question was instead, ‘What have _we_ done?’”  
Albus removed his left hand from his pocket, lifting up the vial on a chain. There were no longer two dancing red spheres in the vial, but only a wisp of dark grey smoke.  
“It seems that a blood pact is far easier to break than anyone knew. Though in this case, proving the concept required a research partner. Thank you for your assistance.”

Gellert threw his tumbler into the fireplace with a shout, and Albus absentmindedly collected the fragments, reassembled them, and levitated the now perfectly restored glass to stand on the mantel next to his own. 

“I imagine that we will be seeing one another again soon.”  
Albus set the vial down on a side table and walked out the door of the apartment. For the first time, he didn’t look back.


End file.
